Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1 (1951), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the arrest of members of the Communist Party who were charged with conspiring to violate the Smith Act.
In support of their motion, petitioners submitted statements as to their financial resources, family relationships, health, prior criminal records, and other information.
The only evidence offered by the government was a record showing that four persons previously convicted under the Smith Act in the Southern District of New York had forfeited bail.
[4] Al Richmond helped found The Daily People's World which was a leftist newspaper in San Francisco, and he served as its executive editor.
Later, Richmond said of the anti-Communist campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, "I think that a lot of people were silenced, and their withdrawal from social commitment extended long afterward."
She was appointed a deputy labor commissioner by Governor Culbert Olson in 1940 and served as the Chairman of the Los Angeles Communist Party (1945).
She appeared on college campuses in support of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, and in 1969, she openly opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969; she effectively removed herself from the Communist Party because of this.
[10] Philip Marshall Connelly, Ernest Otto Fox, Carl Rude Lambert, Henry Steinberg, Oleta O'Connor Yates, and Mary Bernadette Doyle, for which no information is available.
When bail for multiple defendants is set at a higher amount than is necessary to ensure their presence at trial, is this a violation of the Eighth Amendment?
Under the direction of Chief Justice Vinson, who delivered the opinion of the court, it was found that bail had “not been fixed by proper methods in this case.” [11] Chief Justice Vinson summed up the Constitutional issue by stating: “It is not denied that bail for each petitioner has been fixed in a sum much higher than that usually imposed for offenses with like penalties and yet there has been no factual showing to justify such action in this case...Such conduct would inject into our own system of government the very principles of totalitarianism which Congress was seeking to guard against in passing the statute under which petitioners have been indicted.” [12] Essentially, if a court sets an unusually high bail for multiple defendants, the court needs to have evidence regarding the situations of each defendant (whether they are considered a “flight risk”).
President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech on the importance of the act, giving examples of how the bail system had harmed people in the past.